3 ideas
Colonial rule tolerated African rulers who played a picturesque 'traditional' role. It moved against the one who innovated, inventing script, schools, doctrine, and cartography on his own terms. An African modernity that did not pass through the colonizer disproved the civilizing mission's premise. That made the ruler more threatening than any backward chief.
A people with its own script can record its own history, law, and genealogy without translation through a foreign language or archive. That makes the script an instrument of self-rule rather than a mere cultural artifact. Suppressing the script and its schools therefore cuts the chain by which a society authors its own past, turning it into an object of others' records.
The sultan's fall is told through the recollections of a girl brought into the palace as a child, an overlooked presence. Decades later she recounts it to a researcher. The frame shows that official and colonial archives omit what those at the margins saw. Recovering suppressed history depends on oral testimony from people power did not bother to notice.